The two coalitions lasted until 1964 when Barry Goldwater took the South away from the Democrats. Goldwater was crushed in the election, but the coalition shift he heralded reshaped American politics.

While the Democrats retained Northeastern ethnic workers and a growing black voting bloc, the Republicans retained the wealthy, the professionals, farmers, and a shrinking small town base. But the shift of Southern Democrats to the Republicans is what elected Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and the Bushes. Since 1932, the party coalitions had remained stable, with the exception of the white South revolting against integration, which the Democrats championed. This shift to the Republicans resulted in 28 years of Republican presidents in the 48 years between 1968 and 2016.

In those years, a new section of the population emerged: the suburbanites. This group was relatively well-to-do and tended to be better educated. The suburbs were founded by the VA loans to World War II veterans and the interstate highway system that made the land around cities accessible. The pre-World War II suburbs were Republican, but this shifted as the Depression-WWII generation moved in. Then their children, the baby boomers, moved on, and what had been a stable coalition became far more unpredictable.

The boomers had a general tendency to be socially liberal and, over time, more economically conservative. They were better off and so were drawn toward the Republicans. But this group had been forged in the 1960s, and their social perspective was far more flexible.

Increasingly, the Republicans sought to hold and expand their coalition with two strategies. One was the need for tax cuts. The other was the culture wars: opposing abortion and gay marriage, supporting prayer in schools, and the like. During this time, the Democrats remained wedded to the New Deal strategy. Then they added abortion rights, gay rights, and opposition to prayer in schools to their strategy. Cultural issues became at least the equal of economic issues (which had been the center of the New Deal Democrats).

The white South remained attached to the Republicans. African Americans remained attached to the Democrats. The children of the ethnic industrial workers were split. They now lived in the suburbs, and the suburbs were divided by a majority that was socially liberal and a large minority that was socially conservative. Both of these groups shared a general tendency to be economically conservative.

The Divide Becomes Cultural

The issue became increasingly about social mores, with an accelerating movement to normalize what had been considered deviant behavior. The children of the boomers, the millennials, were strikingly like their parents. They had their own cool name, they thought they were completely unlike their parents, and they tended to reinforce their parent’s views.

The country remained rooted in a culture war, while there was a general consensus over more conservative economics. But beneath the surface, a massive shift was taking place.

The foundation of the New Deal coalition was that the Democratic Party was the party of the workers and the Republican Party was the party of the upper-middle class. But the culture wars had cut the Democrats’ ties to blue collar workers without college degrees. This class also tended to be the most socially conservative. This was true not only in the South—where it was intense—but broadly around the country. Opposition to social evolution was present in all classes but most heavily in this class.